Jacqueline Silver is the Founding Director of The Still Room, a studio space for actors, creatives and professionals based at Keswick Hall near Norwich – and home to Sawtooth theatre company. With the summer 2026 acting residency well underway, Jacqueline explains the story behind the space
What can you tell us about Sawtooth and The Still Room?
Sawtooth Productions is a theatre company, established so that creatives of national standing can make work of that calibre where they live, rather than having to leave to find or practise it. It is fundamental: national-level work, made at home – something Arnold Wesker himself advocated.
The work and the room it is made in obey the same principles: to explore the human condition honestly, you need the right conditions yourself – time, space, security, a sense of being held. So, we developed a place with exactly those conditions, and that space is The Still Room, sitting across the first floor of Keswick Hall, large and full of light, with window seats and a long prospect over the grounds and the countryside beyond. It really is only 10 minutes from the centre of Norwich, but that is just enough pause and distance to let you see your own work with clarity.
It also matters who gathers in the space. These are highly experienced actors in leading roles on the country’s major stages: Kirsty Bushell, who played Regan opposite Ian McKellen’s Lear and performed in Antigone alongside Juliette Binoche in Ivo van Hove’s production; Joseph Arkley, who played Katherine in the RSC’s Taming of the Shrew; Matti Houghton, who played Lady Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe. With them are artists of the same standing in music and design, among them Phil Cornwell, whose musical direction includes the Olivier Award-winning In the Heights, and Katy Keyworth, who spent eight years as head of wardrobe on The Play That Goes Wrong. People who grew up in this part of the world or have made their home here.
Why “The Still Room” and “Sawtooth”?
“Still” holds the whole intention in a word. It means time slowed, peace, space to breathe and think – but held, not empty: a stillness that is composed and reverent, in a beautiful room. There is an older meaning too. In a house like this one, the still room was where things were quietly made and prepared, set a little apart from the rush of the household.
The name Sawtooth carries its own connection to light: the company began under the sawtooth roof of an old factory in Norwich’s creative quarter, the kind of roof built to draw in steady north light to work by. So it feels right that its home is now a place where distillation and clarity matter just as much.
Where does your interest in founding the space come from?
After an English Literature degree at York, I trained as an actor at The Poor School in London, then qualified to teach acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and have a Masters in Educational Leadership. Over more than 25 years in arts and education leadership, I have worked in London and abroad, including as a secondary school headteacher and for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as Head of Guildhall Young Artists Norwich and the Norfolk County Youth Orchestra.
Whether you are talking to a child in a school, or working with an actor, or with a character on the page, the work is the same. You are trying to understand a person – not only who they are, but what informs them, what might be possible for them, what constrains them, what might send them in one direction rather than another, and how that in turn impacts the people and the world around them.
What does the Sawtooth theatre company do?
The way we want to work is to take a text and go into it psychologically – carefully, and much further than rehearsal economy often allows. So, we have built this into the company. Catherine England Johnson, an extremely experienced psychotherapist, is not a visitor but a member of it; she works with us directly on the psychology of the characters and the text. The studio is for more than theatre, too. We are interested in all sorts of performance and creative work, including forms we cannot name yet.
And the residency for actors taking place this summer?
The residency grows out of the company; we are all longstanding educators too, and sharing skills, knowledge and experience is part of who we are. So this summer we auditioned and brought together 12 exciting actors from the East of England, all trained to professional standard, who share a passion for creating close to home, for several months of deep work on classical text, directed by the company members, with Catherine alongside them to support the mining of the text.
The space is also used for business and other work?
Artists, photographers, writers and movement practitioners regularly use the room for their own work and practice, and it is open to all of them. And the business use, to my mind, is not a sideline but the same idea carried through. What a studio can offer is something I feel particularly strongly about.
What excites me most is bringing that studio effect to work that does not normally have it: giving a planning day, a workshop, a hard decision or a piece of writing the care we bring to the theatre.
What I did not expect on top of that is what happens when those worlds overlap. A businessperson, an actor, a lawyer and a therapist in the same building across a week start conversations that would not have begun anywhere else and find that what each of them knows is useful to the others or opens their minds.
There is a history to that, too. Keswick Hall was built for the Gurneys in 1817, to a design by William Wilkins, and this room is where a family like theirs would have done exactly this – made things, written, talked, received people from different worlds and let action and conversation do its work. We are not so much repurposing the room as returning it to what it was always for.
Are you Norfolk born?
I am not Norfolk born, but I moved here to be close to family, and I feel thoroughly Norfolk now. There is rich intellectual and creative life here, and it sits within a landscape and at a pace that lets you think. I am proud to be a Norfolk Ambassador for the Norfolk Business Board and a Trustee of the Norfolk County Music Festival.
What do you hope to achieve with the space?
In the end, perhaps it is honouring something from the Gurneys: the understanding that a particular space, tended with care and intention, becomes an investment in human development and contributes to the life of a region. That is exactly what these rooms have been in the past and I hope will continue to be in the future.
How can people find out more or get involved?
Come and see the spaces. The best way to understand The Still Room is to be in it – so whether you are an actor, a maker, a facilitator or a practitioner who might want to work or deliver something here, a business looking for a different kind of space to think in, or simply someone curious, do get in touch. Come in for a coffee and a proper conversation. You can find everything at thestillroom-norwich.co.uk.
The Still Room and Sawtooth Studios Ltd, First Floor, Keswick Hall, Norwich NR4 6TJ.
Featured image of Jacqueline Silver by Jeremy Webb Photography. Other images supplied
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